The Virginian

Sunday, February 28, 2016

MAKING THE CASE FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP

Glenn Reynolds makes a very compelling case for President Trump.

Ex-CIA chief: Armed forces would have to disobey Trump.

See, if a black (or female) Democratic president gave an unlawful order, they’d follow it anyway so as not to be called racist or sexist. So if you’re worried about executive misbehavior, you’ve got to vote for the white male Republican.

Well, when people get lousy K-12 educations, and are then steered into low-paying “social justice” jobs, it’s not a big surprise that they don’t end up wealthy. But this pattern does generate a political army for the Democrats, so there’s that. It’s just that footsoldiers don’t get paid that well.

These numbers are totally fictional. Everybody knows that President Supergenius Hopenchange was the greatest mortal in the history of all mankind, and everything is better due to his wonderful blessings of peace and prosperity. Let none dispute these claims!

Republican Presidential Poll

Saturday, February 27, 2016

Ace of Spades is wrong

It hurts me to say this because I like Ace. But he's attacked Trump in an illogical way. He says that Trump's no Reagan, and that's true; there will never be another Reagan. But that's OK. America has, so far risen to the occasion when it's in trouble and leaders have sprung up. Here's where Ace gets a little ugly:

My problem with Trump is that he is a dealmaker trying to make a sale. Right now he's trying to make a deal with conservatives -- so this is the very most conservative we'll ever see him.

If he gets the nomination, he now starts working on making the second part of the deal with the other party in the negotiations, the general public.

So this is the most conservative we'll ever see Trump -- this is the absolute most conservative he'll ever be -- and he's not conservative at all, except, possibly, on immigration. He combines liberal policy impulses with frankly authoritarian or even fascist ones, which he thinks are "what conservatives want," because, frankly, he conceives of us as ugly-minded, stupid dummies who get off on this shit.

That's why he didn't put the "Ban Muslims" line in a more palatable, persuasive form, like "Reduce immigration from Muslim-majority countries or countries with a terrorism problem to a level where we can vet each individual applicant."

No, he put it in the most bigoted, ugly way he could think of, because that's about his level, and because, also, that's what he thinks "conservatives" are.

I was unable to post my response in his comments (server error) so I'll post it here.

Ace, I love you (in a good, manly way of course) but you’re wrong. It’s not because I know how great a President Trump will be, but because the issues you cited are just wrong. Read the O’Reilly transcript and then tell me that Trump was in favor of importing hundreds of thousands of Syrians. “They're living in hell, and something has to be done.” is not “let’s bring them all to the US.” I realize I’m parsing words here, but you don’t go on O’Reilly’s show for an intelligent debate about foreign policy. You go for face time with the public, and then you leave. The same reason you go to any late night comic’s show. It’s not to disagree with the host; it’s to make a good impression and leave.

You then join (in Peggy Noonan’s words) the protected class by dumping on the unprotected class. When you say that “ … he put it in the most bigoted, ugly way he could think of, because that's about his level, and because, also, that's what he thinks "conservatives" are” you’re also impugning (according to the polls) roughly 44% of Republicans who, according to Reuters, support Trump. So yeah, at this point about 44 out of every 100 Republicans like what Trump’s saying and respond positively to how he’s saying it. So you’re saying what every Liberal asshole with a keyboard and a byline has been saying ever since they lost the Solid South: Republicans are ugly bigots.

Now, I don’t want to pick a fight with a guy with whom I often agree so let me give you an alternative theory. Trump understands the majority of the American people have come to the realization that they are about to lose the country they love to people who don’t love it. They understand that they are being tossed by the wayside by both Democrats and Republicans. Their kids are being indoctrinated to hate America. They are being replaced by cheap foreign labor by the managerial class running America’s industries, and their most deeply held beliefs are despised by the Ruling Class who is determined to make them “bake a cake” – a metaphor for forcing them to do things to which they are morally opposed.

Trump, being a smart man, has seized the opportunity to do a hostile take-over of a brand that has been run into the ground by inept management: the Republican Party. But here’s where you and I differ: it would be beyond stupid for Trump to run as the champion of the people who support him, and then give them the cold shoulder once he claims the prize. Trump may not have been the student of political theory that Reagan was, but he’s not stupid and he’s not going to make the mistake that the Republicans have made once they got to Washington. He’s running as a nationalist and if he wins he will govern as one. He will govern as a champion of the little guy, not just pay them lip service at election time. To do otherwise would turn literally everyone against him. That would not build his brand, and one thing Trump knows how to do is build his brand.

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Trump spoke before a packed theater at Regent University as part of the university's Executive Leadership Presidential Candidate Forums series.

On the debt:

"We owe $19 trillion -- most people don't even know what a trillion dollars is, how many hundreds of millions is in a trillion," Trump said. "It's such a number that, it's a name that 10 years ago you never even heard the word trillion, but we owe $19 trillion.""A very bad budget was passed just about four weeks ago that's going to add at least $2 trillion to it. So we'll be up essentially to $21 trillion, and at a certain point it's really the point of no return. And you really have to have somebody that knows what he or she is doing,"

On the Supreme Court:

Robertson wanted to know if President Trump would have a litmus test for those he'd nominate to the Supreme Court."In your selection as president, what criteria would you use to pick somebody?" he asked."Pro-life. We want-- It starts with that, starts with it. A very conservative, a very, very smart, I mean like Judge (Antonin) Scalia would be a perfect He was a perfect representative,"

On Obamacare:

"We're going to get rid of Obamacare," .... "Obamacare has turned out to be a total disaster."

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

In both Middle America and Middle England, among both rednecks and chavs, voters who have had more than they can stomach of being patronised, nudged, nagged and basically treated as diseased bodies to be corrected rather than lively minds to be engaged are now putting their hope into a different kind of politics. And the entitled Third Way brigade, schooled to rule, believing themselves possessed of a technocratic expertise that trumps the little people’s vulgar political convictions, are not happy. Not one bit.

The Pope left Mexico without meeting with any of the victims of sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic clergy. Relatives of nearly fifty indigenous children in Oaxaca, whose sexual assaults by a priest were documented by the Oaxacan Forum on Children, had asked to be received. A group of victims of similar events in San Luis Potosí also asked to meet with him. All to no avail.

In October of last year the Pope granted a plenary indulgence to the Congregation of the Legionnaires of Christ, founded by the Mexican priest Marcial Maciel, a notorious pederast. The congregation had been through internal investigations and asked victims for forgiveness, but few expected the Pope to be so indulgent.

The visits to Mexico by his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict, were organized by the Congregation of the Legionnaires of Christ, one of the Church’s richest and most powerful organisations. Even before the Pope undertook his trip, with a stopover in Havana, the Vatican had ruled out any meetings with victims of sexual predators donning the clerical robe. In his speeches he condemned trafficking in drugs and people, and corruption and violence, but did not say a word about these victims and incidents.

Cubans recognise this Pope perfectly: he is the same man who refused to receive the “Ladies in White” and who failed to condemn the circumstances under which people languish on the island. He is the same Francis who forgets about these victims, but is quick to pardon those who wronged them.

Saturday, February 20, 2016

I'm a British immigrant, and grew up in a northern English working-class town. Taking my regional accent to Oxford University and then the British civil service, I learned a certain amount about my own class consciousness and other people's snobbery. But in London or Oxford from the 1970s onwards I never witnessed the naked disdain for the working class that much of America's metropolitan elite finds permissible in 2016.

When my wife and I bought some land in West Virginia and built a house there, many friends in Washington asked why we would ever do that. Jokes about guns, banjo music, in-breeding, people without teeth and so forth often followed. These Washington friends, in case you were wondering, are good people. They'd be offended by crass, cruel jokes about any other group. They deplore prejudice and keep an eye out for unconscious bias. More than a few object to the term, "illegal immigrant." Yet somehow they feel the white working class has it coming.

My neighbors in West Virginia are good people too. Hard to believe, since some work outside and not all have degrees, but trust me on this. They're aware of how they're seen by the upper orders. They understand the prevailing view that they're bigots, too stupid to know what's good for them, and they see that this contempt is reserved especially for them. The ones I know don't seem all that angry or bitter -- they find it funny more than infuriating -- but they sure don't like being looked down on.

Many of them are Trump supporters.

Trump's outrageousness is the key.

The fact that he's outrageous is essential. (Ask yourself, what would he be without his outrageousness? Take that away and nothing remains.) Trump delights mainly in offending the people who think they're superior -- the people who radiate contempt for his supporters. The more he offends the superior people, the more his supporters like it. Trump wages war on political correctness. Political correctness requires more than ordinary courtesy: It's a ritual, like knowing which fork to use, by which superior people recognize each other.

This isn't the whole explanation of Trumpism, by any means, but I think it's part of the explanation. Supporting Trump is an act of class protest -- not just over hard economic times, the effect of immigration on wages or the depredations of Wall Street, but also, and perhaps most of all, over lack of respect. That's something no American, with or without a college degree, will stand for.

The country is in an "Eff you" mood and that's what Trump embodies. Is he going to be a good President? Who knows? Can he do something about the nation's problems? I hope so; he has managed to do some pretty great things in his chosen field. Can he do something for the Middle Class; the men and women without the fancy college degrees who are living paycheck to paycheck and running up credit card debt? Can he do something about the cost of higher education which has now gotten so expensive that it's unaffordable to people who are not millionaires? Can he build that wall? Can he bring good paying jobs back? Who can be sure?

But he has not been flaked and shaped by the Washington food grinder into a homogeneous mush. He has accomplished his dreams despite opposition from the political establishment, often by paying them off, often by using publicity. He knew how to use the Bully Pulpit before actually acquiring the ultimate Bully Pulpit.

Lots of people are saying that after the spectacular failures of the current Ruling Class: it's worth a shot.

Friday, February 19, 2016

Donald Trump is succeeding, we're told, because he appeals to angry voters — but that's obvious; tell me more. Why are they angry, and how does he appeal to them? In 2016, Americans want to vote for a person and not a white paper. If you care about America's fate under Obama, naturally you are angry; voters should distrust a candidate who is not angry.

But there's more to it than mere anger. Chris Christie was angry, and he's gone. Trump has hit on important issues — immigration, the economy, appeasement unlimited — in ways that appeal to voters emotionally. There's nothing wrong with that; I trust someone who feels what I feel more than a person who merely thinks what I think. But though Rubio and Cruz are plainly capable of connecting with voters emotionally, Trump is way ahead — for many reasons, but the most important is obvious and virtually ignored.

Political correctness. Trump hasn't made it a campaign theme exactly, but he mentions it often with angry disgust. Reporters, pundits, and the other candidates treat it as a sideshow, a handy way for Trump (King Kong Jr.) to smack down the pitiful airplanes that attack him as he bestrides his mighty tower, roaring. But the analysts have it exactly backward. Political correctness is the biggest issue facing America today. Even Trump has just barely faced up to it. The ironic name disguises the real nature of this force, which ought to be called invasive leftism or thought-police liberalism or metastasized progressivism. The old-time American mainstream, working- and middle-class white males and their families, is mad as hell about political correctness and the havoc it has wreaked for 40 years — havoc made worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it. Republicans rarely even acknowledge its existence as the open wound it really is; a wound that will fester forever until someone has the nerve to heal it — or the patient succumbs. To watch young minorities protest their maltreatment on fancy campuses when your own working life has seen, from the very start, relentless discrimination in favor of minorities—such events can make people a little testy.

We are fighting Islamic terrorism, but the president won't even say "Islamic terrorism." It sounds like a joke — but it isn't funny. It connects straight to other problems that terrify America's nonelites, people who do not belong (or whose spouses or children don't belong) to the races or groups that are revered and protected under p.c. law and theology.

Political correctness means that when the Marines discover that combat units are less effective if they include women, a hack overrules them. What's more important, guys, combat effectiveness or leftist dogma? No contest! Nor is it hard to notice that putting women in combat is not exactly the kind of issue that most American women are losing sleep over. It matters only to a small, powerful clique of delusional ideologues. (The insinuation that our p.c. military is upholding the rights of women everywhere, that your average American woman values feminist dogma over the strongest-possible fighting force—as if women were just too ditzy to care about boring things like winning battles—is rage-making.)

The mainstream press largely ignored the Marines story. Mainstream reporters can't see the crucial importance of political correctness because they are wholly immersed in it, can't conceive of questioning it; it is the very stuff of their thinking, their heart's blood. Most have been raised in this faith and have no other. Can you blame them if they take it for granted?

Why did the EPA try to issue a diktat designed to destroy the American coal industry in exchange for decreases in carbon emissions that were purely symbolic? Political correctness required this decree. It is not just a matter of infantile posing, like pretending to be offended by the name Washington Redskins. Bureaucrats have been ordered by those on high to put their p.c. principles into practice, and the character of American government is changing.

The IRS attacks conservative groups — and not one IRS worker has the integrity or guts to resign on principle, not one. Political correctness is a creed, and the creed holds that American conservatives are ignorant, stupid, and evil. This has been the creed for a generation, but people are angry now because we see, for the first time, political correctness powering an administration and a federal bureaucracy the way a big V-8 powers a sports car. The Department of Justice contributes its opinion that the IRS was guilty of no crime — and has made other politically slanted decisions too; and those decisions all express the credo of thought-police liberalism, as captured by the motto soon to be mounted (we hear) above the main door at the White House, the IRS, and the DOJ: We know what's best; you shut up.

It's a gigantic, terrifying problem—and no other candidate even mentions it! If Cruz and Rubio and Bush choose to be taken seriously by voters (versus analysts), they will follow Trump in attacking this deadly corrosion that weakens democracy from the inside, leaving a fragile shell that crumbles to powder in the first stiff breeze.

The State Department, naturally, is installing the same motto above its door — together with a flag emblazoned with a presidential phone and a presidential pen, the sacred instruments of invasive leftism. Christians are persecuted, enslaved, murdered in the Middle East, but the Obama regime is not interested. In a distant but related twist, Obama orders Christian organizations to dispense contraceptives whether they want to or not. This is political correctness in action — invasive leftism. Political correctness holds that Christians are a bygone force, reactionary, naïve, and irrelevant. If you don't believe it, go to the universities that trained Obama, Columbia and Harvard, and listen. We live in the Biblical Republic, founded by devout Christians with a Creed (liberty, equality, democracy) supported directly — each separate principle — by ancient Hebrew verses. Christianity created this nation. But p.c. people don't know history. Don't even know that there is any. Stalin forced the old Bolsheviks to confess to crimes they never committed, then had them shot. Today, boring-vanilla Americans are forced to atone for crimes committed before they were born. Radically different levels of violence; same underlying class-warfare principle.

And we still haven't come to the main point. Many white male job-seekers have faced aggressive state-enforced bigotry their whole lives. It doesn't matter much to a Washington wiseguy, left or right, if firemen in New Haven (whites and Hispanics) pass a test for promotion that is peremptorily thrown in the trash after the fact because no blacks scored high enough. Who cares? It hardly matters if a white child and a black child of equal intelligence study equally hard, get equally good grades and recommendations—and the black kid gets into college X but the white kid doesn't. Who would vote for a president based on that kind of trivia? This sort of corruption never bothers rich or well-educated families. There's always room at the top. But such things do matter to many citizens of this country, who are in the bad habit of expecting honesty and fairness from the institutions that define our society, and who don't have quite as many fancy, exciting opportunities as the elect families of the p.c. true believers. In analyzing Trump, Washington misses the point, is staggeringly wide of the point. Only Trump has the common sense to mention the elephant in the room. Naturally he is winning.

Why, by the way, was Trump alone honored by a proposal in the British Parliament that he be banned from the country? Something about Trump drives Europeans crazy. Not the things that drive me crazy: his slandering John McCain, mocking a disabled reporter, revealing no concept of American foreign policy, repeating that ugly lie about George W. Bush supposedly tricking us into war with Iraq. The British don't care about such things one way or the other — they are used to American vulgarians. But a man who attacks political correctness is attacking the holy of holies, the whole basis of governance in Europe, where galloping p.c. is the established religion—and has been effective for half a century at keeping the masses quiet so their rulers can arrange everybody's life properly. Europe never has been comfortable with democracy.

The day Obama was inaugurated, he might have done a noble thing. He might have delivered an inaugural address in which he said: This nation used to be guilty of race prejudice, but today I can tell you that there is no speck of race prejudice in any corner of the government or the laws of this country, and that is an amazing achievement of which every American ought to be deeply proud. An individual American here or there is racist; but that's his right in a free country; if he commits no crime, let him think and say what he likes. But I know and you know, and the whole world knows, that the overwhelming majority of Americans has thoroughly, from the heart, renounced race prejudice forever. So let's have three cheers for our uniquely noble nation—and let's move on tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

But he didn't.

Worst of all its crimes is what invasive leftism has done to our schools. Trump's unprivileged, unclassy supporters understand that their children are filled full of leftist bile every day at school and college. These parents don't always have the time or energy to set their children straight. But they are not stupid. They know what is going on.

Cruz, Rubio, Bush, and Carson — even Kasich — could slam thought-police liberalism in every speech. They'd concede that Trump was right to bring the issue forward. Their own records are perfectly consistent with despising political correctness. It's just that they lacked the wisdom or maybe the courage to acknowledge how deep this corruption reaches into America's soul. It's not too late for them to join him in exposing this cancer afflicting America's spirit, the malign and ferocious arrogance of p.c.

Remind you of something?

Donald Trump is running amok in the GOP china shop and gleefully tearing the place up.

They see no way out:

The key to Trump’s strength, which buttresses all his outrageousness, is that his supporters want someone to blow up the system. So there's almost nothing he can say or do that will discredit him in their eyes, and the least destructive scenario for his defeat — Trump blows himself up — will take some doing on his part.

What Lowry still doesn't get is that Trump is his creation, and the rest of the Republican Ruling Class. You can only have so much contempt for the well-being of the Country Class before they pick up their pitchforks and storm the castle. You sided with the Country Class in the culture war ... and lost. At the same time you were destroying their economic base. You were exporting their jobs and sacrificing their future on the alter of "comparative advantage." It was a pain you never felt as economic powerhouses - like Wal Mart - were built on the basis of importing stuff all labelled "Made in China."

The truth will only dawn when columns can be written by cheap labor in Asia and Lowry is given the pink slip.

In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News, Pat Buchanan declared that Trump’s rise represents a rejection of 25 years of Bush Republicanism— an ideology which Buchanan says has destroyed America’s once-great manufacturing core, flooded the country with low-skilled workers, and drained the treasury with ill-advised foreign adventures in the Middle East.

“In the GOP nomination race, the chickens of a quarter century of Bush Republicanism have come home to roost,” Buchanan told Breitbart. “Trump’s triumphs to date are due to his recognition of, and identification with, the Middle American revolt against Bush family ideology and policy, and what it has produced.”

Buchanan explained that “America is rejecting the Bush immigration policy,” which has “proffered amnesty” to “12 million illegals… because it said the United States is helpless to do anything about their presence here.”

“America’s establishment has failed America,” Buchanan said, “The single clearest message in the presidential campaign of 2015-2016 is that the American people would like to cleanse our capital city of its ruling class.”

Buchanan exemplifies the strain of American culture that identifies with Middle America, populism and nationalism. The Bush family is part of the Ruling Class, Trump (despite his wealth) is part of the Country Class. Trump is the beneficiary of the vision Pat articulated in 2008. The chickens are finally coming home to roost.

By a margin of nearly five-to-one, the American people believe these so-called free trade deals lower wages rather than raise them, according to Pew polling data.

Amid a resurgence in the pace of unaccompanied migrant children crossing the U.S. border, President Barack Obama is facing angry opposition as he searches for places to house them temporarily.

The administration is attempting to assemble a network of shelters on military bases and other federal facilities to lodge thousands of children awaiting immigration proceedings after fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. That’s hit a nerve in communities, some in crucial presidential swing states such as Colorado and Florida, where potential facilities were announced without community input and later scrapped.

“I don’t want a military base to be an orphanage,” said Veronica Kemeny, president of the Republican Veterans of Florida, who lives in Panama City near an Air Force Base that was named as a potential shelter.

Being critical of refugees can get you arrested, and getting "Shadowbanned" on Twitter if you're not a Liberal

Police in Scotland said that a man had been held under the Communications Act, which bans “grossly offensive” and “menacing” posts on online platforms.

The Facebook posts in question, which were not released to the media, allegedly concerned comments about Syrian refugees from Rothersay, on the Scottish Island of Bute, where several refugee families have settled as part of the UK government’s settlement program.

A spokesman from the the Dunoon police station in Argyll said, “I hope that the arrest of this individual sends a clear message that Police Scotland will not tolerate any form of activity which could incite hatred and provoke offensive comments on social media.

Nazis did not become popular by promising to start world War 2, and lose. He promised jobs and the restoration of pride. The Communists didn't promise mass starvation, the Gulag and show trials. They promised food, land and the end of war. Totalitarians always put a veneer of "goodness" over their demand for power. This is the way the world works. And to have this done in Europe is an ominous sign.

And in this country, Twitter is doing its best to swing the election for Democrats in 2016 with the tactic of "shadowbanning."

Rumours that Twitter has begun ‘shadowbanning’ politically inconvenient users have been confirmed by a source inside the company, who spoke exclusively to Breitbart Tech. His claim was corroborated by a senior editor at a major publisher.

According to the source, Twitter maintains a ‘whitelist’ of favoured Twitter accounts and a ‘blacklist’ of unfavoured accounts. Accounts on the whitelist are prioritised in search results, even if they’re not the most popular among users. Meanwhile, accounts on the blacklist have their posts hidden from both search results and other users’ timelines.

For weeks, users have been reporting that tweets from populist conservatives, members of the alternative right, cultural libertarians, and other anti-PC dissidents have disappeared from their timelines.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

WASHINGTON—Moving quickly to begin the process of filling the unexpected vacancy on the Supreme Court bench, President Obama spent much of the weekend compiling a shortlist of gay, transsexual abortion doctors to replace the late Antonin Scalia, White House sources confirmed Monday. “These are all exemplary candidates with strong homosexual values and proven records of performing partial-birth abortions, but am I missing anyone?” Obama reportedly asked himself while reviewing his list of queer, gender-nonconforming, feminist Planned Parenthood employees, all of whom were also said to be black immigrants. “I definitely have enough post-op transsexuals on the list, but it is a little light on pre-op candidates. And I should probably add a cop killer or two on here just to round out my options.” Sources later confirmed that Obama was attempting to rapidly narrow the list down to the single best nominee to submit to the Senate in hopes of wrapping up confirmation hearings before his choice had to leave to attend the Hajj pilgrimage.

So, why does Donald Trump accuse George Bush of lying about WMDs in Iraq?

Even if you’re not satisfied by the sarin-tipped rockets and other chemical weapons that were found in Iraq, or discount the many plausible accounts of more weapons being shipped to Syria, and conveniently forget the many other persuasive casus belli offered for the Iraq war, and assume that an absence of more widely publicized evidence is evidence of absence, an allegation that any president knowingly lied to the American people about non-existent weapons of mass destruction to launch a war for still unstated reasons carries a burden a proof. One would have to explain why such a diabolical president would launch a war on a pretext he knew would be exposed, or why such a diabolical president wouldn’t plant some evidence to cover his crime, which shouldn’t have been too hard after recruiting the intelligence agencies of every American ally in Europe and the Middle East to bolster his made-up claims, not to mention getting all those inspectors from the United Nations to say they had their own suspicions about what was going on in Iraq, and we’d like to think it’s still hard to make that case to a majority of Republican primary voters.

I think the errors Bush made in Iraq came after Saddam was toppled; and the disaster came after Obama was elected and abandoned that fragile and still unstable country. He lost the war that Bush won.

But that does not explain Trump’s position. Perhaps he really does believe that the Bush administration lied about the certainty of WMDs. But more important, the “Bush Lied, People Died” meme is now firmly embedded in popular culture. With the exception of people like me, who believe that Saddam was an existential threat and needed to be removed, not just contained, many on the Right, including congressmen, now think that the Iraq war was a mistake.

Seventy-one percent of Americans now say that the war in Iraq “wasn’t worth it,” a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll shows, with skepticism about the lengthy war effort up substantially even in the last 18 months.

In my opinion, Trump is doing what successful businessmen do; they give their customers what they want: the border sealed, stop exporting jobs and bring those jobs back to the U.S., protection from Muslims on Jihad, and an America that’s “Great Again.”

During this election they don’t want to re-fight the culture wars that seem to have been lost to the Left, even if they agree with Conservatives that the culture is important. At this point in time, the existential threat to America and to its middle class is too great. They don't think that the Political class understands the situation or knows what to do.

At this point Americans may we willing to make the same deal they made in World War II: ally with Stalin to defeat Hitler. Can we fix the culture once the country is back to an even keel? We don’t know, but Trump believes that the majority he needs to win the election has its priorities.

I’ll crawl over broken glass to vote for the Republican in the general election, no matter his name. After that, we’ll fight the culture wars.

Monday, February 15, 2016

"Democratic Socialism"

Which leads us to Banksy.

It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.

You see, that’s funny, ? because they are not holding guns, but bananas instead?

Banksy has all the weight of the elites behind him because he gives expression to the doublethink contradictions they can’t admit to themselves. He fits in with the same unsustainable “Anarchists For Big Government” vibe that made the Occupy movement such a debacle.

The problem is yesterday’s anti-establishment is now the establishment itself. It likes the privileges that come with control of the media, academia, the arts and government. Big business is no fool, it’s toeing the party line now too. But the whole self-concept and self-aggrandizement of this counter-culture hinges on it being “counter,” and that is no longer the case. What’s an edgy rebel to do when your fellow travelers have Gramscied their way into cultural domination? How can you speak truth to power, when you ARE the power?

A summation of Banksy’s merit came in 2013. On the streets of New York City a surrogate street vendor set up a booth that offered genuine Banksy stencil and spray paint canvases for $60 each. These “originals” could have been worth a million through a gallery or auction house, but thousands people passed by the display without any interest at all. In the end there were 3 sales, including two pieces to a patron that demanded a discount off the already low price.

Once the truth came out, of course the works soared in value. The power of Name Brand Recognition kicked in to make these small purchases the equivalent of winning some weird lottery. Two of the canvases recent sold for $214,000.

So who got it right-the hordes of people walking by who saw nothing worth noticing, or the suckers who paid extravagant fees to possess a relic of someone’s networking skills?

Perhaps English media figure Charlie Brooker summed it up best: Banksy gained such art world stature because “…his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that’ll do.”

A good lesson from the past ... what cause the housing crisis that led to the Great Recession

Uploaded on Sep 30, 2008

This video is an informative look at the factors that are causing our current financial and economic crisis. It discusses policy changes 13 years ago that unleashed the sub-prime mortgage-backed securities market, which accelerated prices erratically, inviting speculation and loose lending practices which were both condoned and encouraged by existing regulation and carried out by risk-blind executives and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Ed Driscoll quoted Ace in the context of reminding us how much liberals hate America, or at least that part of America where white heterosexual men work for a living. It was a strange thing to watch Thursday’s debate between the insurgent socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and the increasingly frantic former frontrunner Hillary Clinton, where the key issue seemed to be which one of them was more capable of destroying whatever fragments of American civilization might still be intact after Barack Obama concludes his eight-year effort to wreck the country.

The Democrat Party is the world’s most successful hate group. It attracts poor people who hate rich people, black people who hate white people, gay people who hate straight people, feminists who hate men, environmentalists who hate the internal combustion engine, and a lot of bratty college kids who hate their parents. However, the real secret of the party’s success is that it attracts the support of journalists who hate Republicans, and who therefore work tirelessly to convince the rest of us that we should vote for Democrats....

No matter who the Republicans nominate for president, the Organized Forces of Liberal Journalism will paint him as a greedy, cold-hearted, woman-hating racist. If the GOP nominated a Buddhist monk or a Latina lesbian, still the New York Times and NBC News would find a way to convince themselves that the Republican candidate represented everything liberals hate about America — the military, the police, Christianity, capitalism, the internal combustion engine and heterosexual white men who work for a living.

And my friend’s story isn’t the only nightmare Americans have been experiencing. A Facebook page dedicated to ACA horror stories has been created, and the stories are heartbreaking.FreedomWorks last year did an article of its own, detailing top ObamaCare horror stories, including that of a pastor diagnosed with stage three cancer of the esophagus who was told – just minutes before getting chemotherapy – that his treatment would not be covered.Meanwhile, the left’s smarmy, arrogant, lying, biased, craptastic excuse for an economist Paul Krugman last year claimed the ObamaCare horror stories were “imaginary” – concocted by those who obviously just are too ignorant to know how FAAAAABULOUS ObamaCare and too stupid to know what’s good for them.These are real people with real life problems, betrayed by politicians and pundits who couldn’t even begin to understand what it’s like to not know how your next grocery bill will be paid, or what it’s like to lose sleep, because the IRS says you owe them money you don’t have.

Both Albright’s and Steinem’s comments generated a firestorm of outrage – on the left, where in the past the insinuation has always been accepted: If you’re a woman and you don’t support so-called “progressive feminist leaders,” there is something wrong with you. If you’re critical of them, then you must hate women or something. And, they’ve also said in so many words, men should have no say in “women’s issues” unless they agree with conventional feminist wisdom.

It’s long been known that the only self-professed socialist in the Senate spent time on a kibbutz, or communal farm. Nothing wrong with that. But so tight-lipped has Sanders been about it that the Israeli daily Haaretz put its reporters on the mystery.

“One of Israel’s best-kept secrets” is how the paper described the name of Sanders’ kibbutz. At one point it thought it had found the senator’s name in a kibbutz archive, but it turned out to be a Bernice Stamder.

Haaretz finally solved the mystery last week, with the discovery, in its own files, of an interview Sanders gave to the paper back in 1990. In it, the future senator speaks of spending time on a kibbutz called Shaar Haamakim.

The kibbutz, according to the Times of Israel, belonged to an Israeli political party called Mapam, which had in the 1950s “been a communist, Soviet-affiliated faction.” It said kibbutz members “had admired Joseph Stalin until his death.”

And it appears that Sanders, like Obama doesn't like America. Read the whole thing.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

I've been reading some of Reagan's old speeches to confirm something to myself. At the Trump-less debate, Rand Paul finished his closing statement by saying something like, "And I'm the only Republican who'll balance the budget."

This provoked a reaction from me, because I thought -- would Reagan have just made the promise that he would balance the budget? In a closing statement, in which he could chose his own words as he liked?

Looking back at Reagan's speeches, I don't see him just promising some government action. I see him promising a government action and then immediately telling you how this will directly and tangibly benefit you.

He didn't leave you to wonder how cutting taxes might help you. He would say something elegant and magical like, "Just as free speech encourages good journalism, so do low tax rates and low regularity burdens on the farmer or businessman produce prosperity."

By the way, that's another thing Trump gets right, though he says it crudely. When did Republicans stop talking about prosperity, like it's the dirty thing the Democrats say it is? Trump gets a lot wrong -- a lot -- but he does keep telling people, "We're gonna get rich."

I hear a lot of people talking about "getting the economy back on track." What the hell does that mean? The economy is an abstraction. Money in your pocket, that's tangible. That's real. And "prosperity" is an elegant, wonderful word to describe having money and getting rich.

So I have to say, for those not understanding what other people hear in Trump's (admittedly) poorly thought out and boastful words, those are two key things people are hearing: I'm on your side, I understand your pain.

And: I'll make you rich.

Why aren't other people talking about this more?

No one should talk about reducing regulatory burdens ever again without then completing the thought and saying, "Allowing our businessmen to make things, and our farmer to grow things, without spending so much time keeping the federal government fat and happy with make-work, makes them richer, makes more products on the shelves at lower prices, and makes you richer, too."

Reagan was a teacher. He didn't just talk about policy preferences or ideology. In simple (and yet gorgeously elegant) language, he explained how each of his policies would do one of the following:

* This will make you freer.

* This will make you safer.

* This will make you richer.

* This will make you happier.

* This will make a better world for your children.

This is critically important. Don't tell people your policy proposal, tell them how your policy proposal will benefit them.

“The law is a ass – a idiot,” declared Mr Bumble in Charles Dicken's classic novel Oliver Twist, which was released 178 years ago to the month.

Bumble would have no doubt have added some choice expletives to his observation if he’d been in Blackfriars Crown Court in London last week, to witness the unjust case brought against Mark Pearson.

Mark Pearson said he had endured a year-long "Kafkaesque nightmare" as a result of the complaint.

Pearson, a 51-year-old artist, was tried for a sex crime simply because he brushed past a female film star during rush hour at Waterloo Tube station without even breaking his stride.

His accuser (who shall remain anonymous for life) claimed Pearson penetrated her with three fingers for “two or three seconds”.

CCTV of the footage irrefutably backs Pearson’s account; it took a jury of nine women and three men just 90 minutes to unanimously reject the accuser’s version of events and find Pearson innocent.

After the case, Mr Pearson, who still suffers anxiety attacks, said, “This could have happened to anyone. For me, half a second turned into a year of hell. I feel I have undergone a form of mental torture sanctioned by the state. Why couldn’t the CPS have used common sense?”

Which begs the bigger question: why, despite having seen the CCTV evidence (there were also no witnesses nor forensic evidence), did the Crown Prosecution Service still see fit to push for prosecution?

I don’t know Nick Cole. I spoke with him on the internet for the first time this week. I’ve never read any of his books, but apparently lots of people have. From what I understand he was a solid midlister, who was selling well, and growing his backlist. The usual good career track stuff. His last book did well and got great reviews. However, one small bit in the next (under contract) book in the series hopelessly offended a young editor at Harper and it went sideways. But read Nick’s account. It is fascinating stuff.

For years we’ve known there is a liberal bias in the publishing industry. I mean come on, almost all of them work in Manhattan. Duh. Of course the publishing industry vehemently denies that. Left wing fans don’t see it the same way fish don’t notice water is wet. It just is. Right wing fans get sick of being preached at or treated like they’re stupid, and go spend their entertainment dollars elsewhere.

Because this isn’t my first rodeo, I already know exactly how Nick is going to get attacked and dismissed.

There has been a striking display of chutzpah among Democrats as they try to make a national campaign out of police-brutality allegations that wrong-foots Republicans. Regardless of what you think about the merit of the underlying allegations, the question of how police departments and other municipal agencies are run in Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc., has not a whole heck of a lot to do with any Republican: We are talking almost exclusively about Democrat-monopoly cities that have been that way for a long time. The extent of Republican involvement in the issue, if Moulitsas’s vapid prose and our eyes are to be believed, is Giuliani’s talking about the Super Bowl halftime show on Fox News.

Who runs Baltimore? Who runs Chicago? Who runs Los Angeles? How far from the site of Tamir Rice’s shooting would you have to drive to find a Republican with real municipal political power? What’s standing in the way of reforming the Cleveland police department? John Kasich? Please. You may as well blame Rick Santorum. If you are going to blame a Republican for the state of Baltimore, it would make just as much sense to choose Abe Lincoln as Rudy Giuliani.

The current crisis over North African and Middle Eastern migrants’ violence toward women is proving that the PC culture they have so carefully constructed is cracking around them, forcing into conflict two of their sacred principles: Blame whatever it is on the white man and, in cases of rape, always believe the woman over the man.

As a pillar of the progressive movement, the feminists want to be on the side of the refugees flooding the EU from the Middle East and Northern Africa. After all, the refugees are an oppressed minority group, and therefore should be on the feminist team fighting the Old World’s white patriarchy.

But the masses of refugees include lots of men. Lots.

In fact, an estimated 75 percent of refugees to the European Union last year were men, and they weren’t exactly keen on fighting for women’s rights.

In fact, most of these guys really like the patriarchy, and a patriarchy far more aggressively anti-woman than anything privileged Western feminists have encountered in the liberal enclaves of Berlin and Brussels.

Feminists have too much invested in hating men to face reality. The rapes will continue until the situation improves.

"Dr. King gave his life so that America would be a place where we are judged by the content of our character not the color of our skin," said radio personality Craig Johnson. "Now we have poverty pimps being led by our current president Barack Obama who all they talk about is the color of skin."

School leaders apologized on Wednesday for a controversial video slammed by parents in Henrico.

Henrico, Va. Feb. 10, 2016 – Today Henrico County Public Schools is issuing additional public response to concerns from the local community pertaining to a video played during student assemblies Feb. 4 at Glen Allen High School.

The YouTube video, titled "Structural Discrimination: The Unequal Opportunity Race," was shown to students at a Glen Allen High School Black History month program, but left some parents outraged.

Now, Henrico School Board Chairman Micky Ogburn is apologizing and says the county is revisiting the diversity efforts.

“We are making every effort to respond to our community. It is our goal to prevent the recurrence of this type of event. School leaders have been instructed not to use the video in our schools," said Ogburn. "In addition, steps are being taken to prevent the use of racially divisive materials in the future. We do apologize to those who were offended and for the unintended impact on our community.”

A divided Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to halt enforcement of President Barack Obama's sweeping plan to address climate change until after legal challenges are resolved. The surprising move is a blow to the administration and a victory for the coalition of 27 mostly Republican-led states and industry opponents that call the regulations "an unprecedented power grab."

By temporarily freezing the rule the high court's order signals that opponents have made a strong argument against the plan. A federal appeals court last month refused to put it on hold. The court's four liberal justices said they would have denied the request.

The first and most important of these is basic integrity. The Obama administration has been remarkably scandal-free. Think of the way Iran-contra or the Lewinsky scandals swallowed years from Reagan and Clinton.

If you see Fast & Furious, the IRS targeting conservatives, failure to faithfully enforce the laws, lying about Benghazi, lying about ObamaCare, a Secretary of State with her own e-mail server, Solyndra, political contributions from foreign sources as basic integrity, I suppose you have a point.

As Europe goes down the drain, it's political class speeds the descent.

The head of the Swedish police has sparked outrage by expressing sympathy with the teenage asylum seeker accused of murdering social worker Alexander Mezher.

National Police Commissioner Dan Eliasson, who has already admitted police cannot cope with the wave of migrant crime, said he has concerns about the ‘horrors’ and trauma the accused murderer may have witnessed.

He said he was ‘distraught’ on behalf of Miss Mezher’s family but also for the killer, saying: ‘What has that person been through? Under what circumstances has he grown up? What is the trauma he carries?’

Tuesday, February 09, 2016

Steinem was still something of a household name back when she defended Bill Clinton against the sickening allegations of Paula Jones, writing that even if he did use his office to order a state trooper to summon a young and low-level government employee to a hotel room where he exposed himself and made a suggestive remark and then used his office to tarnish her reputation it was no reason he shouldn’t be president, and she some retained some credibility when she later wrote that an allegation Clarence Thomas might have made an off-color joke and an unwanted request for a date should disqualify him from the Supreme Court, but by now she won’t do Clinton’s wronged wife any good. Today’s young women have plenty of chances to “hook up” with bearded and disheveled and self-described socialist young men, who in most cases they won’t care what candidate she prefers, even if it’s a Republican, and few of them have ever heard of Steinem. Albright was a lousy Secretary of State, as was Clinton, and even such racist Republicans as ourselves much preferred the First Black Woman Secretary of State in between, and the worst of all might turn out to be John Kerry, who is the first White Male Secretary of State since John Foster Dulles or John Quincy Adams or one of those guys, so by now we figure that all of us can expect some special place in hell, and we don’t expect those young women at the Sanders rallies will pay her any mind. As for the idea that a woman can’t be schlubby and play in politics, the fine observer Ann Althouse suggested a look at any old video of Rep. Bella Abzug back in the ’70s glory days of The Sisterhood, which looks and sounds eerily like a Sanders rant.

At some point the elders of The Sisterhood are going to have cowgirl up and admit that at last part of the problem is that Hillary Clinton is awful and old and obviously incompetent and thoroughly corrupt and phony,and while sanders is also awful and old his incompetence isn’t yet proved and he’s untainted by all that Wall Street money the young folks so despise and he quite authentically is a full-blown crazy socialist as he describes himself, and he’s promising more free stuff than Clinton can and a full-blown bound-to-be-fun revolution to boot. The feminist cause has always been subordinated to the First Black This or First Hispanic That or stopping whatever war the left was griping about, and forced genital mutilation and honor killings of rape are always subordinate to multi-cultural tolerance, and there’s a young woman in Germany who sent out a selfie with hand-drawn offer to “Trade Rapists for Racist,” and every part of the whole leftist project has been in service of The Revolution that the schlubby Sanders somehow seems to be leading.

At the core, feminism is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party with the morals of an ally cat.